Principal Tower concludes Principal Place masterplan by Foster + Partners
14/01/2020.
[LON] UK
metalocus, ÁNGEL TORNE
metalocus, ÁNGEL TORNE
Project description by Foster + Partners
The completion of Principal Tower is the final piece of the Principal Place masterplan, a comprehensively planned mixed-use scheme on the border of Shoreditch and the City of London that creates a thriving new neighbourhood, drawing on the rich industrial heritage of the area. It comprises a 15-storey office building that hosts the London headquarters for Amazon, alongside one of London’s tallest residential buildings, the 50-storey Principal Tower, with six eateries that wrap around the building at street level and a light bar, creating a 360-degree active frontage that extends the vibrancy of the City towards the north.
The relationship between the creative, formerly industrial east end and London’s financial centre is expressed in the tower’s massing, which appears as three slim volumes. Where the tower addresses the residential neighbourhood of Shoreditch, it appears lower from ground level, while from the west it reflects the high-rise nature of the City. A central volume rises up between the two to provide an elegant marker on the skyline.
The 50-storey building offers a variety of apartment sizes, topped by spectacular penthouses on the top. Designed from the inside-out, there are eight apartments on a typical floor: four two-bedroom apartments that occupy the main corners of the plan, and four one-bedroom apartments. The square floorplate has been extended in the centre of two sides to create a cruciform plan and most importantly eight corners, each one of which forms a curved balcony. By maximising the perimeter in this way, all the units on the typical floors are dual aspect, with a very efficient plan that places the entrance at the heart of the apartment to eliminate unnecessary corridors. The bedrooms are enclosed by solid cladding panels for privacy, while the remainder of the apartment is fully glazed and protected by shading fins. Every apartment has a curved balcony at the corners that provides a double aspect with bronze exterior detailing – externally, this softens the tower’s profile, adding a rich texture, and creates a residential scale that contrasts with typical City buildings that surround it.
Providing 85,000 square-metres of flexible premium office space, the office building houses the UK headquarters of Amazon. The primary entrance to the building opens out onto a new plaza, creating an active interface with the surrounding urban environment, and generating a place that establishes connections within the community. Internally, the building is designed as a 21st-century warehouse that responds to the changing nature of the workplace, offering a more interactive and flexible model. Spanning over 100 metres, the innovative office floors allow for an exciting mix of spaces that operate at different scales, from large open-plan areas to small pockets of space that enhance collaboration and creativity.
Three ‘wing cores’ on the north and south façades provide points of natural contraction that impart a spatial rhythm to the interior volume, which is clearly articulated on the building’s façade. Its segmented form responds to Shoreditch’s industrial built heritage, bringing a sense of continuity to the streetscape as you move from the City to the north. The refined materiality of metal and glass offers a unique texture to the building, with an expressed bronze structural frame that references the historic cast-iron structures found in the area.
Norman Foster is considered by many to be the most prominent architect in Britain. He won the 1999 Pritzker Architecture Prize and the 2009 Príncipe de Asturias de las Artes Prize.
Lord Foster rebuilt the Reichstag as a new German Parliament in Berlin and designed a contemporary Great Court for the British Museum. He linked St. Paul's Cathedral to the Tate Modern with the Millennium Bridge, a steel footbridge across the Thames. He designed the Hearst Corporation Building in Manhattan, at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
He was born in Manchester, England, in 1935. Among his firm’s many other projects are London’s City Hall, the Bilbao Metro in Spain, the Canary Wharf Underground Station in London and the renovated courtyard of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery in Washington.
In the 1970s, Lord Foster was one of the most visible practitioners of a high-tech architecture that fetishized machine culture. His triumphant 1986 Hong Kong and Shanghai bank building, conceived as a kit-of-parts plugged into a towering steel frame, was capitalism's answer to the populist Pompidou Center in Paris.
Nicolai Ouroussoff, The Times’s architecture critic, has written that although Lord Foster’s work has become sleeker and more predictable in recent years, his forms are always driven by an internal structural logic, and they treat their surroundings with a refreshing bluntness.
Awarded the Prince of Asturias of the Arts 2009.
METALOCUS > 05.2017